From academic discovery to industrial applications: Innovation and success in materials science and engineering
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Introduction You’ve done the benchtop work, you’ve optimized the parameters, and your prototype system—a new solar cell, a ceramic coating, a component for biomedical prostheses—works perfectly. It’s all set to commercialize. What now? As anyone who has been in this position knows, you’re on the brink of the most perilous part of the journey. Sure, making the prototype was a hard slog, but you knew where you were going and what challenges you’d face. You’re an academic (let’s say), so this is your job—this is what you wrote that grant proposal for; this is what was needed to get that paper published. But if you’re going to see that product used by manufacturers and companies worldwide, you now need really serious money. You have to scale up production of the thing cobbled together in the lab so that it becomes a commercially viable proposition. It’s a big risk, because, until the device or material gets out into the marketplace, no one knows if anyone will buy it. Who is going to take that kind of risk? Where does the money for scaling up come from, and how can you achieve scale-up for a fraction of the cost of making the prototype? Arguably most important of all, how do you find your market and attract customers? And will the market pay the price you need? Facing these questions, innovations developed in academic labs typically confront a “valley of death”: a barren wasteland where R&D funding has stopped before a potential
product has been commercialized and can provide revenue (see Figure 1). This is where a great many promising materials systems come to grief. How can the valley be crossed?
Starting a spin-off: Luck versus planning Although universities are now almost universally eager to see researchers create start-up companies to commercialize their innovations—not least because this brings in both money and kudos—it’s easy to get it wrong (see the sidebar on Market failures). Ceramic scientist Jon Binner of the University of Birmingham in England, past president of the UK Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, has had some successes with spin-offs and commercial applications, such as ceramic foams for bone grafts and ultratough nanostructured zirconia.1 But he admits that the harvest seems meager in comparison to the time and money invested in his basic research. In retrospect, he says, the lessons seem obvious “and really shouldn’t have needed learning”—but the problems never seemed so clear at the time. For example, you need to have a dedicated team, not just a doctoral student or two working on the project, and this team needs to include the individual who did the original research. You need to know your market and get your timing right. You also need luck—lots of luck. Binner said that it’s vital to involve industrial partners as early as possible. Otherwise, you risk spending lots of time and effort on some aspect of the problem that industrialists
Philip Ball, Science Writer, London, UK; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2015.275
© 2015 Materials Research Society
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 40
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